In today's competitive environment, credit and debit card-holding customers are using their cards to access financial services from more remote locations via a multitude of external network providers. To better compete, financial issuers, acquirers, and processors alike are looking for newer, more cost effective means to bypass middle players and directly connect to more networks.
Traditionally the Electronic Funds Transfer (“EFT”) arena is restricted to mainframe processing systems and software, creating substantial cost entry barriers to smaller entities that would otherwise have significant need to process financial transactions. This forces these smaller entities to outsource their EFT transaction operations to third party vendors who are more expensive per transaction.
To provide superior service levels and to maintain data processing integrity, organizations must plan for and test the complete range of operational extremes. Many times, weaknesses in application software or hardware systems only surface under extreme operating conditions.
It is highly desirable to provide a means for testing the capacity of EFT systems by testing the ability of the EFT system to handle volumes of electronic funds transactions representative of expected transactions both in terms of the quantities of such transactions and the various types of such transactions.